The Real Laws of Attraction

Age has its compensations. Compensations, if you will, for the ravages of time on your face, the indignities of a body that will no longer obey your desires. Of these compensations, none is more precious that the advantage age bestows upon your eyes. For although your vision may become blurred, your ability to “see” through people increases 10-fold, no 100-fold, with each passing decade. You acquire a kind of “x-ray vision”.

That, at least, is what has happened to me. Now, as I look back over the decades, I can see certain patterns that I could not discern in my twenties and thirties. In the long arc of time, I can see now why some people have “ended up” where they have.

Why do people end up where they do? Why are some people able to find riches, while other, much smarter people remain frustrated and relatively poor through-out their lives? Why do some people attract wealth and others seem to repel it? Why do some people attract friends while others die lonely? Why do some people live fearlessly while others shrink from opportunities? Why are some people lucky in love while others can never seem to find happiness?

I do not know all the answers to these fundamental questions. No one does. But I can share some pretty good clues to the answers, based on the long experience of my life, now more than half over, across 4 continents and many countries, across many cultures, hundreds of friends, births and deaths.

The 3 Keys to Attracting Wealth – How to Get Lucky in Life

1. Know the Value of a Brick. Think being born rich is the key to being rich? Not exactly. Let me share a story with you.

I know several people who were born into extremely affluent families. One man I know inherited a share of a waste disposal company worth well over $100 million. Let’s call him Perry. Perry’s share was worth about $10 million on paper and produced an annual income to him before taxes of over $2 million. He inherited his share as one of the children of the second wife of his father, who started the company.

Shortly after he inherited his share, Perry invested almost his entire first year’s share of profits in a film project he had been nursing for the better part of a decade. It bombed. No problem, he still had annual income for the second year. He had a “great idea” to diversify into other projects so, God forbid, something happened to waste disposal, he had something else to produce income. So, Perry hired a financial adviser who put him into several partnerships in oil-and-gas ventures, commercial real estate and tax schemes designed to “guarantee” him income.

You can guess the outcome. They all tanked. Some of his investments were pulled down the drain by the down-currents of the general economic downturn, some others tanked just because they were lousy investments no matter what the economic environment.

It would have been bad enough had Perry merely lost the money he had invested in these schemes. But it got worse. For two of these schemes, his financial adviser had my friend to sign a personal guarantee for a loan. The idea was that he could deduct the interest and that would reduce his tax exposure during the years while the investment ramped up into year-after-year of sky high profits. Well, the “ramp up” never came. But the loan payments did. And when my friend’s cash flow couldn’t cover the loans, he ultimately had to cough up collateral.

Guess what his collateral was? Those shares of the family business he had inherited. So, just like that, within 5 years of inheriting a share of a business that should have set him up for life, my friend was back where he started. Nearly broke.

This type of story happens over and over again. You may have heard about the story of the widow of John Kluge, Patricia Kluge. John Kluge was one of the world’s richest men, with a net worth estimated at $5 billion. Patricia Kluge was born in Iran and met Kluge on a business trip to New York when she was a young model. After she and Kluge divorced in 1989, Patricia Kluge received a divorce settlement of $1 million a year and a sprawling 24,000 square foot Virginia estate. She then re-married and she and her new husband turned the land around the estate into a vineyard. It flopped. And earlier this year, the Bank of America foreclosed on her Virginia estate in February of 2011. Faced with over $65 million in debt from the failed wine business, Patricia Kluge and her new husband had to declare bankruptcy in March of 2011.

Moral of the story? Being born into wealth is no guarantee that you will end up wealthy. Marrying wealth is no guarantee that you will end up wealthy.

What do my friend’s story and Patricia Kluge’s sad story have in common? They both got their wealth through windfalls. People who attract wealth through windfalls did not earn it. People who earn their wealth the hard way learn thousands of little rules of living with wealth. They learn to put aside money, because a rainy day will come. They learn not to spend to your last dime. They learn the value of a dollar. They learn that what’s behind that dollar is not some tax scheme to make a million more bucks, but some employee’s hard day’s work. In other words, a dollar is not a dollar. It’s a person’s blood, sweat and tears. They become builders. The children and apouses who merely inherit the fruits of the labor of the builders never inherit the builder’s most precious asset – the knowledge of how to build. The knowledge of the value of a dollar.

You, my readers, out there in the world struggling to make ends meet, pouring your sweat into your projects every single day, you have much in common with the builders of the world. You know the value of a brick. Sure, it’s just a single brick today. But you take it in your hands, lovingly place some mortar around it every day, and firmly place it in line with other bricks. Your back gets sore stacking up those bricks. Your brow gets sweaty. As you labor in the sun, plenty of your neighbors and friends may laugh at your simple labors. But you know what? Over time, you sit back , wipe your brow, and you can see that those single bricks have become a wall. That wall has become a room. That room has become a house. That house has become a mansion. Your mansion. How much better it has been to build your mansion—brick by brick – than to have inherited a house built by someone else.

So, take that brick in your hand. Write that hub. Polish that essay. Ignore those who don’t understand your labors. You’ll enjoy the richest prize of all one day. The admiration of other brick-layers. And a house you built with your own hands. A house that can shelter you from any storm.

2. Invest in People. Throughout life, I have seen people get “lucky”. But as I look back on it, none of it was luck. These seemingly lucky breaks actually were almost pre-destined. How? By behavior these lucky few practiced over and over. One such habit of wealthy people is that they invest in people.

What do I mean? People who are wealthy almost never get there by themselves. Almost 100% of them have a team of supporters, partners, and love ones around them constantly. The ability to attract and, more importantly, to keep a supportive circle is one of the keys to becoming wealthy in life.

Think about it. Each of us only has a certain amount of energy, will, and time. Even if you invested 100% of your time to your pursuit, you could only go as far as your limited energy, will and time will let you. But imagine if you could double the amount of time spent on your pursuit. You can do that by marrying right, by partnering right, by keeping your friends, by keeping your employees invested in you. These wonderful, unselfish souls in effect donate their life force to help you get where you want to be. It’s an amazing act of love. And it will never come your way, unless you earn that love. You have to earn that devotion by showing devotion. You have to invest in your marriage, in your relationship, in your partnership, in your employees, in your fellow hubsters. Spend time with them. And they will in turn invest their support, their life force with you.

It has to be a 2-way street. People who know that you never give back, that you’re not loyal, start to withdraw from you over time. They come to understand that whatever they put into you will never be returned. So, out of self-preservation, they make a logical choice to pick up their contributions of will, energy and time and invest them elsewhere. They make someone else rich. Not you.

So, they leave you. And you, if you’re a slow learner, write it off to being “unlucky”. But if you have an ounce of insight, you’ll start to see that you left them first. Here’s a story. I knew a young woman when I first started out working in an office. Let’s call her Anne. What a terrible person she was. I was a junior assistant to her. She treated me horribly, demeaning me whenever she could. Then, one day, I saw her crying. I didn’t ask why (okay , I lacked humanity at that time; my compassion quota was all used up by her meanness). But I hung around, eavesdropping while Anne poured her story out to another co-worker.

It seems that Anne had come home to find that her husband was inside packing. A U-Haul was outside the house with most of his things already in it. He was leaving. As Anne sobbed, I remember knowing – not thinking, knowing –that Anne had played a big part in making him leave. But she sobbed “He never even told me why!”. From where I sat, he had told her many times. I had seen the two of them at a company function six months earlier. I had heard her use that same condescending, demeaning tone with him that she had used with me. I had watched his face turn to stone as he bore the humiliation silently. Anyone who had witnessed Anne’s treatment of him could have told her there was a U-Haul in her future.

People don’t invest in people who treat them badly. At least healthy, productive people don’t. So, if you want people to stick around in your life long enough to partner with you, to work with you, to help you lay some bricks, to help you build your house, then you better learn how to invest in them. Friends, family and loved ones are often your first source of venture capital. They're the first ones who believe in your ideas and who part with their hard-earned money to get you started. In fact, that's why some refer to them as "angel investors".

Invest compassion in them, invest thoughtfulness in them, invest loyalty in them, invest, invest, invest. Over time, those investments will pay off many times over for you.

3. Character Is Destiny. Have you ever heard the phrase, “nice guys finish last”. Well, it’s partially wrong. If by “nice” you mean honest, trustworthy, and dependable. A final story, if you will. I had a friend who had lost her love of many years. She had met him when she was married to someone else in her late thirties. Let’s call her Giselle. Giselle and her boyfriend Paul were a pair for 20 years, traveling together every year to Europe. Paul even bought Giselle an apartment. There was only one problem. Paul was married.

So, my friend had been a mistress to Paul for 20 years. Now, Paul had died, and my friend was stripped bare by grief. One summer, about a year after Paul’s death, I invited Giselle to visit. During that visit, we were invited over to another friend’s house for dinner. Let’s call her Nancy. Nancy has been married to Joe for many years. Nancy and Joe are a great couple, still youthful-looking even though they are each over 50. They work out at the gym together, they still send each other love notes. A great pair and I love them. So, over we went to Nancy’s house for dinner, to break bread and to cheer up our mutual friend Giselle.

About half way through the dinner, I noticed something strange. Giselle was curling up next to Joe, being charming, very charming. I noticed that Nancy's face had turned from a welcoming smile into a watchful frown. I tried to signal to Giselle to stop her charm-offensive with Joe. But she couldn’t –or wouldn’t hear my signals. Of course, by the end of the dinner, Nancy had a full-blown scowl on her face. Two days after the party, Nancy told me that Giselle had actually slipped her phone number into Joe’s hands.

Nancy and I both confronted Giselle about her behavior. Giselle then broke down crying and apologized profusely. But the damage was done.

Giselle was never again trusted by either Nancy or me. How had this happened? What clues did we, Giselle’s circle of friends, miss?

Well, the biggest clue was right there in front of us all those years. Giselle had been someone’s mistress for many years. And although we had never thought about it in just these terms, that behavior of Giselle meant that Giselle had become comfortable with disrespecting the boundaries of marriage. To Giselle, fidelity was not a vow. It was a suggestion. Loyalty was not a vow. It was a suggestion. Honesty was not way of life. It was a suggestion.

Character is destiny. Giselle lost not only her love – someone else’s husband after all – but also the trust of her dear friend Nancy. And my trust as well.

Had her character been different, she would have us as assets for the rest of her life. We would have been there to pick her up. We would have been there to walk her through the transition to another pattern of life, perhaps with another love. Now, like all people who lead lives in which they break their word, are disloyal and untrustworthy, she will end up alone.

So, it is not true that nice guys finish last. They may not always finish first. But wherever they finish in the race, there will be a loving circle of friends at the finish line waiting there to embrace them and celebrate their journey.